Flowers in Andalusia
by NorthernTrash-x
Summary: Seto/OC. For Ashfia1.5Bleach. Seto Kaiba was not known for his warmth.


On request from Ashfia1.5Bleach- the second of two. I hope you enjoy, and I apologise for the delay in finishing this.

I'm pretty sure that this is the longest one-shot that I have ever written. It's only been quickly proof-read, so I apologise for any mistakes.

Seto x OC

Niamh is pronounced 'NEE-ve'

**Flowers in Andalusia**

_But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man _  
_That he didn't, didn't already have_  
America

Seto Kaiba was not an ordinary man. He never had been, and never would be. He had succeeded with extraordinary accomplishments in his years, and he was still the age that most would consider to be very youthful. But, despite his experience in business, no one would have believed, looking at the cold face of KaibaCorp's CEO, that he had ever held a lover close to him, that he had ever welcomed another into his heart. He was a creature of ice and power, not one who dealt in the pleasantries of love and emotion. It was not something that you could ever put your finger quite on; something about the way he looked at you, something about the cool gaze that settled on you if you were unfortunate enough to be in his way, something hard and unfeeling, that you would only see soften, if only a little, if you were to see him with his brother.

And if you were to ask him, ask him if he had ever been in love, he would raise an elegant eyebrow at you, and if he were in a good mood he might only glare. People would not believe that he was even capable of caring- and even those who did, like Yugi, who still called on the brothers from time to time, were beginning to give up hope. Only Mokuba knew the truth of the matter, and he knew well enough to keep quiet about it. When people asked he smiled, and shook his head, and shrugged, a lovely mixture of pleasant ambiguity that gave nothing away. Seto liked his privacy, and it would not do to ruin the image that he had made, the personality that he was known for, the hardness that kept him ruthless and successful.

But Seto Kaiba, genius and duellist, did have a lover, far away from curiosity and the knowledge of the rest of the world.

And if ever you were to ask him about Andalusia, something in those cold, fathomless eyes might just, for a moment, warm.

* * *

He had met her first in New York, on a business trip. He had walked into an evening event and she had inexplicably attached herself to his side, although he still, to date, had no idea what she had been doing there. She told him that since he was the most attractive man in the room he was going to be her date for the night, and although he had directed his most terrifying glare and scathing comments in her direction she had only laughed at him, and slipped away, leaving him with a business card that was blank except for a single number.

He had never intended to call it, had in fact thrown it away, but to his dismay he had seen her a few days later, in a coffee shop near his American offices. His personal assistant had decided that it would be a good day to call in sick (she was given an official warning and demoted) and, in an entirely unusual action, had acted on whim and decided to take the elevator and walk the fifty meters down the street to the nearest coffee shop, to collect his pre-ordered coffee himself. She was sat at a table, and waved at him as he came in. For a moment he struggled to place her, but she tossed her hair behind her shoulder and the action triggered a memory. She was much less striking out of the scarlet dress she had been wearing, but he remembered her face. He was a CEO after all- many business deals required him being nice to people, and part of that was actually remembering them.

She had beckoned him over, and to his annoyance he had actually walked to her table, if only to tell her that he had absolutely no interest in her. However (and he still had not worked out quite what she had done) she managed to get him to sit down, and drink his coffee with her, and before he knew what was going on he somehow had a date with her, although the fact that the date was to an event being hosted by a prestigious publishing company that he had considered doing business with did help, of course. Otherwise, he might have stood her up, or at least had his assistant call to cancel.

However, he decided to go, if only because it would be good business sense and because to get anywhere in America it seemed that you needed to court the media, and to appear at such an event with an attractive and mysterious- he had searched her name on the internet, and she was no-one of any note- partner did nothing to hurt your public image.

From there, it had just got incredibly complicated, incredibly quickly. How they had developed into whatever it was that they were was of no real concern, and nothing that he cared to recount- not even to his brother. As far as he was concerned, that was his own business, and no one else's. He loved his brother very much, but as far as he was concerned, their were certain aspects of his life that he did not want Mokuba to know about, and vice versa- one of the main reasons that he had never made a Facebook account. Did no one respect privacy any more?

He supposed she was sort of like a mistress. That sort of thing was really quite fashionable now, wasn't it, for a rich businessmen like himself? Except that he had no dutiful, expediently arranged wife waiting at home with him, and this was not an illicit tryst. And she never took anything off him, either- never even liked him to pay for expensive meals. She was surprisingly undemanding of him, and did not like dressing up and going out, preferred instead to stay in with him. Although he met her in America she did not live there, had only been visiting, and after the whirlwind of their first meeting he came to visit her where she was based, in the south of Spain.

She lived, he complained, in a very awkward place. Why could she not, if she was determined to live in such an odd part of Europe, move to one of the bigger cities, such as Malaga, which might have been easier to visit? But no, she lived in Ronda, which although was a city was more difficult to get to, and was of much less consequence, although he did have to admit that it was beautiful, in a very quaint, historical sort of way. She shared a narrow, tall house with a half-Swiss, half-English girl who, despite the British habit of butchering food, was an exquisite cook. She often made them meals, because she enjoyed to prepare lavish food, and as Abella laughed, she herself could not cook nearly as well as her friend. They went out only occasionally, and always to the small, local places that served piping hot food with local wine and you sat elbow to elbow with the next table. It was always uncomfortably warm in the clothes that he was accustomed to wearing, but he was far too stubborn ever to change.

The house itself was slightly strange, the sort of look that interior designers would have called bohemian, and more realistic people might have called a mess of colour. There were several walls covered in floor-to-ceiling murals, detailed and fairy-tale-beautiful, which she had painted herself. She often laughed and told him that that was her only skill- she was a freelance artist, who drew the illustrations for children's novels.

They had a funny arrangement, the two friends. The friend, who had startling Scandinavian colouring and the manners and deportment of the English, tended to the vegetable garden that took up nearly half of what they had outside, and Abella kept the flower-house, although he suspected that she did less in there than she let on. They grew beds and beds of flowers, which they sold to a neighbour who ran a market stall for fresh produce. It wasn't good business sense, he had tried to tell them, but they had just looked at him incredulously. What was the need in business sense? That sort of logic, they had told him in a way that was almost patronising, had absolutely no place in flowers.

"It takes the fun out of things, Seto. Don't you see that?"

He didn't, but decided not to argue. Logic might not have 'fit', but it did save him from starting arguments that he was never going to win (although, Seto Kaiba would never have acknowledged that there would ever have been something that he could not win).

The two would take afternoon tea in the greenhouse, basking in the warm weather, with homemade biscuits between them, piles of books at their sides. Niamh read weighty tomes and intellectual novels, but Abella preferred, as she laughed, 'more normal' books. The paint on the wooden beams and glass-frames was blistered and peeling, and many of the windows themselves were smeared with soil, but neither of them seemed particularly to mind too much.

He hadn't understood, not then.

Seto had liked to send her expensive bouquets of flowers weekly back then, at the start, and he had not known what to make of it to see them so haphazardly thrown into whatever vase could be found that was large enough- great urns made of cheap, green, chipped glass, or salad bowls, the stems cut short. He found time for brief visits only every month or so, so never knew what happened to the flowers in between his presence, but assumed that the carefully constructed, designer bouquets all suffered the same fate. He saw them in the hall way and in the lounge, in the kitchen and in the small, cramped conservatory, but never in her room, although she always did have flowers there.

They were always in a white enamel jug, patterned in blue. Apparently Niamh had given it her, on the day they moved in. It had a wide, rounded handle and the pointed curve of a spout on the rim, and was made of the thick, cheap sort of china that a diplomat would have called rustic, but which she just liked. It always spilled with flowers, bright, unorganised and distastefully arranged, without any regard to pattern or formal symmetry. They were always tulips, red and orange and yellow and those strange ones that had veins of all the colours running through them, the look that reminded him of a painting that Mokuba had done when he was very young, and looked as though he had just spilled paint upon the page (and, judging from how thick the dried paint was, he might not have been too far off the truth there). They tumbled out in wild abandon, always the first thing to see when he woke in her narrow bed barely big enough for two- the sun spilling through the petals, making them bright and surreal, like remnants of his dreams.

Her bedroom was on the top floor, the attic room with a line of wide sky-lights that lit the room, when the sun was out, with a painful brightness.

In those early months he had not often woken there in the morning- most of the time, as he did at home, he woke up during the night to work through. He had learnt a long time ago to exist on very little sleep, and it was a very productive way to get things done. Even now, with Mokuba graduated and taken over part of the company and so part of Seto's work, there was still a lot to do. It was strange that he still thought of Mokuba as a child- but then, in many ways, he still was. That had been part of the reason that Seto had never let him take any part in the business until he was old enough to know that he wanted to- he had been denied a childhood, after all: what right did he have to do the same to his brother?

She had woken once, to the sound of the tapping of his laptop keys. He did not turn to her, although he was faintly surprised- she was a very deep sleeper, and had never woken in the night before to see him.

"Seto, what are you doing?"

"Working."

He could sense the disbelief in her voice, tinged with tiredness.

"Why the hell are you working now?"

"I don't sleep all that much."

"Is that because you have to do work, or because you're just not able to sleep?"

He shrugged, eyes not leaving the glow of the laptop.

"Both, I suppose."

"Perhaps you think too much."

"You can never think too much."

She laughed.

"Do you think Shakespeare mourned for Macbeth as he lay in bed at night?"

"That is a ludicrous question. It has nothing to do with anything."

She shook her head at him.

"You shouldn't be thinking so hard about work. Come back to bed."

"I have to finish this spreadsheet."

"I'm not going back to bed until you do, as well."

And so she sat next to him as he did it, leaning on him half-asleep but always forcing herself to stay awake, to not slip fully back, until he had finished his work. And when he did, instead of starting another piece, he shut the lid and half-carried her back to bed where, to his surprise, he fell back to sleep without the slightest care that, for the first time in years, there was work still to be completed.

* * *

Of course, once he realised that he really did care for her, he began to consider the possibility that Mokuba would not get along with her, and quickly came to the conclusion that, no matter what, he could never stay with a person who did not love his brother, and who his brother did not love in turn. Blood, after all, was all that he had had, for so many, many years. When he finally gave in to the pestering request of his brother, he had been particularly disagreeable on the flight over, mainly because a part of him that he would never admit to having was scared- scared that they would dislike each other; that this strange, dream-like situation might unravel in front of him.

But that had been ridiculous, of course.

She took them out to greenhouse, and she and Mokuba knelt on the ground, planting row after row of flower bulbs, watering them in and laughing as they flicked bits of dirt at each other. She told them that she always made visitors plant bulbs with her, and labelled each row with one of those stained, white plastic tags that gardeners used. She wrote 'Mokuba' on one, and pushed it into the soil, and told him that when they flowered they would go in the vase in her bedroom, so that she could think of him.

Seto felt vaguely disconcerted that he had not been asked to plant any, but Mokuba asked the question instead, and Abella had laughed, and told them that she would ask him when she thought he was ready to agree to do it.

The two had got on amazingly well, his brother exclaiming over all of her paintings. He had flirted- and wasn't that terrifying to see, his baby brother able to make a woman blush- with Niamh, who showed him and Abella how to make Florentines. Mokuba fitted in, as if he had always been part of the house, as if he belonged there, and that was exactly the way that the two women felt, as well. Seto had almost, in fact, began to feel left out. The Florentines were cooling on a wire rack and Mokuba and Abella sat in the kitchen, at the big old oak table with mismatching chairs, talking and shelling the peas that Niamh had picked from their vegetable garden that morning. It was such a strangely familial, homely scene that had not known, at all, how to join in.

Abella had solved that problem in the end, rolling her eyes and kicking out a chair. He sat with them, and sent e-mails from his neat little laptop, and pretended that he lived like this every day, that, in fact, his life could allow him to live like this.

This house- everything about it seemed to be blessed with an intimacy and warmth that he could not remember ever knowing. They seemed to inhabit a piece of time and space where nothing mattered, and nothing could ever hurt them, like the warmth of childhood summers, and even in the dark rain of winter they were happy, living together without care or circumstance. There were no real concerns or worries, nothing to fret about- they did not stay up, hunched over their computers, or spent hours on conference calls with irate people trying to negotiate and finalise contracts that gave him a headache and put him in an incredibly bad mood. When they stayed up, it was because they were having too much fun to sleep, and when they talked it was in real conversation, sometimes about trivial things and sometimes not; either way, it was of no real concern.

He supposed that his adopted father, had he met them all, would have disapproved of them, of their remiss lifestyle and their disregard for rest of the world and, he suspected, taxes.

He wondered, on occasion, if they ever had any concerns at all- there was always food plentifully available, and money never seemed to be much of a concern for them, although he never quite thought that it was his place to ask. He knew that Abella did her freelance art, on the paint-covered and battered desk that sat in a tiny box-room tucked away on the side of the greenhouse, but he presumed that Niamh must have inherited her money, because all she did with her time was write, in her own laughing words, spectacularly unpopular novels. Niamh read the papers, Abella drew her pictures, and life was, if not perfect, then as good as anyone reasonable could hope it to be.

And he soon began to feel comfortable with them, too. Mokuba had always been sociable, and it had been no wonder that he had sunk in so quickly, but soon he began to relax there. There was no pressure on him, and although at first that had felt strange (when had been the last time that he had not had some sort of pressure?) it soon began to seem quite wonderful, to have no one watching him; to have no one searching for faults or failings or cause to criticise him. Maybe a part of that was the fact that this was so far away from home, from Japan- KaibaCorp had expanded to America, but not, after all, to Europe. He was not a household name here- he could walk down the street, and no-one would give him a second glance. He was a lot more anonymous here and, on occasion, could even let his frown slip away, although as soon as he realised that he had done so it would always come back, like a reflex.

These people did not expect anything from him except his company, his conversation and, every now and then, a bottle of wine to be brought to their table. There was something refreshing about that.

That was not to say that they did not sometimes argue. One of the easiest parts of his relationship with Abella was that she never tried to coerce him into doing anything, never tried to force him to return when he could not, but that did not mean that she did not get angry about it. The amount of time he could afford to give to visiting her could not change, despite his deepening attachment to the place, and although she understood that it still hurt, when times were busy and it was more than a month, on rare occasions more than two months, before he could come back. He called her when he could, but neither could ever quite find the same ease that they could in her home, could never translate it across the vast distance and the telephone line.

Sometimes, too, this escalated on his visits, when he arrived without apology. Once, in a pique of frustration, she had demanded to know why the hell he even bothered. He told her with his own sharp, emotionless brand of anger that it was convenient for him, and she had stormed out of the house, muttering curses under her breath. In the kitchen, Niamh was scrubbing new-dug potatoes, and as he took a seat at the breakfast bar across from the sink she had slid a peeler across to him. Of course, that was far too demeaning a task for Seto Kaiba to do, so he had ignored it, glaring broodingly into space instead.

Niamh finished a potato, placing it in the bowl that sat between the two of them before selecting another from the pile beside her.

"You know, that was quite a cruel thing to say."

"What?"

"'This is convenient for me'?"

Niamh smiled at him, a little patronising.

"Now, come on. We all know that isn't true."

Seto just stared at her, with the blank face that he had perfected to prevent any of the truth being seen.

"For one, flying half way across the world is no-one's idea of convenient. Now, that's just poor rationality."

Seto at least had the decency to look, for just a moment, a little ashamed at that.

"And for another, that is far too cold a thing to say, considering how warm your eyes are when you look at her."

He growled a half-hearted 'shut up' to her, but had grudgingly picked up the peeler anyway. He felt a strange sort of pride about being able to peel a potato, something which he had never done before. It may have been demeaning, but there was something strangely satisfying about knowing that, regardless of what he was doing, Seto Kaiba really was good at everything.

She had come back a few hours later, as the sun had begun to set, and although neither had ever apologised there was a wordless understanding between them that the situation was over, and that was enough. She did not hold grudges particularly well, and for that he was grateful. Her skin, that night, was just as warm as it had ever been, and as she whispered his name, soft and breathy, she did so with no less passion. She wound her arms around him and pulled him down on her faded sheets, on her pile of mismatching pillows, and kissed the skin on his shoulder with just the scrape of her teeth there to make him shudder, and he let himself smile, because she could not see it.

He thought it was impossible to believe, the sweetness that she had, that surprised him every time. It was nothing like the rushed, near clinical encounters that he had had before, nothing that he was used to. Even when they were not in bed, her touches held a tenderness that he was not used to, but then, he supposed, she had never had to want for anything in her life- not in material terms, although she had had a comfortable upbringing, but in _love_. She had had all of the affection and kindness that had been denied to him, by the loss of his parents and the severity of his time with his adopted father and the walls that he himself had put up, to stop anyone coming near to him. She broke those down without even trying, and she poured all that warmth out of herself when she was in his arms, when he was sunk deep inside of her, when his tongue was in her mouth and her hips with pressing against his.

When she looked at him the way that she did, when she forgave him with such wordless, unconditional ease, how could he help but wonder what he himself would have been like, if he had been gifted a different life?

But then, the lure of his laptop called him back, and he slipped out of bed almost a little ashamed of how he had let go of himself, and sat up the rest of the night working.

* * *

He never offered any information about his own past, about what he had seen and done. He supposed that she might have looked him up on the internet- there was reams on him, after all, even just outside the KaibaCorp profile of him, but he was not particularly concerned if she had, because she never brought it up with him. She could know what she wanted, as long as she did not expect him to talk about it with her. He had never been the sort of lover that explained every scar that the other found; he did not tell sweetly anecdotal stories about the little memories that remained focused on his skin. It made no difference, did it, that the small, irregularly coloured patch of skin on his lower back was from when Mokuba had been very young, and he had had to push his brother out of the way of a pan of boiling water that he had been pulling off the stove, but part of it had caught him?

Those memories were hazy: they were his, and his alone, from a time before being a Kaiba, from before the orphanage, from when he had parents and a home and a childhood and _a bike_, he remembered getting a bike and feeling so inexplicably free when he rode it as fast as he could and the wind was in his hair and he was laughing so loudly…

But that was for him. No matter what he felt about her, those were the memories that had kept him going for so long, and giving them away might cause them to diminish.

To his relief though, she had never asked, and his secrets could remain his own.

Out of an odd sort of respect, Seto himself did not demand any sort of knowledge about her, either. However, she often simply volunteered it, as if it was of no significance to her, and maybe it wasn't. Maybe it didn't matter that once, many years ago, he had had a bike, a blue bike with flames on the mudguards that had made him so happy.

Maybe it was trivial, but he did not care.

She told him about her scars though, although she did not have many, but he supposed too that she had her own secrets. Her skin was the sort of all-over, even tan that can only ever be gift of genetics, never the sun. It was a soft colour, not quite anything in particular, the colour, she laughed, of a milky cappuccino. She wasn't native to Spain, he thought, or she had at least been brought up in England, although she did speak Spanish quite well. She had never expanded on it, despite commenting on it, and once he had heard Niamh ask her jokingly what she called herself when people asked her nationality.

"A little of this, a little of that. Does it matter?"

He had got more detail from Niamh, although it had been a while later, when he had come across her in the mood for talking. Most of the time Niamh was as closed as Seto himself was, and as quiet, but on occasion she would be in a chatty mood, and she would ramble about whatever had caught her attention.

"I've always been a little jealous about her skin. I tan really well, but I only ever get an uneven one, you know?"

He looked at her. Indeed, her forearms glowed a nice brown, but the underneath was still softly white, and although her face and chest were dark her legs, which were visible in her shorts, were still pale.

"S'because I rarely wear anything but jeans, and I don't like to sunbathe. But Abella… well, I suppose it is her mix, after all. She's a bit Spanish, a bit Moroccan, but she was brought up in England, where everyone is pale."

He nodded, and resisted the urge to smile. Just because he would not inquire did not mean that he was not incredibly curious about her- just that he had to catch other people at the right time. Seto never liked to ask about the personal lives of _anyone_ around him- he disliked divulging his own background so particularly much, after all, but this often meant that he was in the dark about some things that might have so easily been illuminated had he not been too stubborn to ask.

There was often a third woman around, although she did not live with them. He got the impression that they had known her a long time, and she certainly had been their when he had first started to get used to the house. She was strikingly beautiful in a very professional way, like a model, with soft lips and very striking cheekbones, and she really did have true-Spanish colouring, as well as the language. She was far too short, however, for the catwalk, and although her English was heavily accented it was very good, cultured. Her hair was always coiled around the back of her head, as dark a brown as Abella's but straight, and much finer.

Apparently she too was not a neighbour, although she did still live in Andalusia- she lived in Cordoba, worked at the curator of the museum there, but other than that no one ever explicitly said who she was, as if they assumed that he would just know.

Although she was like a friend there was something about her that struck him as _more_ than just that, but it was months until he realised. He had been walking down the stairs to the kitchen for a drink, quite late on, and the saw through the living room door. She had been lying on the sofa, clearly fast asleep, and Niamh was leaning over her, kneeling on the floor. The moment was caught beautifully, framed in the doorway like a photograph as Niamh leant down and pressed feather-light kisses to her eyelids as she slept.

Seto went through to the kitchen without making any acknowledgement of what he had seen to Niamh as he walked past, although she had noticed him. Part of himself felt strangely proud that he had managed to find out this part of their lives: like, finally, he was truly becoming part of what they were, that he no longer needed things explaining to him.

He heard the muffled sounds of sleepy voices from the next room, and watched the two of them stumble out of the room and up the stairs, Niamh because she was half-carrying the woman and she because she was half-asleep.

He watched the two kiss before they tried the stairs, the sort of kiss that always made people look as if they were trying to find their souls within the cluttered mess of their own bodies.

He didn't think that he'd ever kissed someone like that, and he wasn't sure quite how that made him feel.

He had waited a while before going back to bed, where Abella was still half-awake, folded into the covers and lying on her front, face pressed against the pillows, all of which were assorted reds and blues and greens. The sheets this time were purple, the duvet cover a navy blue. She looked up when she heard him come in, to smile at him. He sat down next to her with all the refined dignity that he could muster, despite the sudden desire simply to throw himself down onto the bed, and feel her snuggle up against his warmth. She was like a live furnace herself, so much so that it meant that they were never cold, despite the drafts and the slatted, uncovered wooden floor.

"People say that I don't have a heart, you know."

He had no idea what had prompted him to make that comment, but he heard it as she must have, spoken in the tone she had dubbed his 'work-voice'- cold, emotionless, and not particularly pleasant. She sat up, propped on her elbows and rubbing her eyes with her fists, a yawn in her voice. The line of her back looked like that of a cat stretching.

"That's silly."

She rested her head against his bare chest, hair spilling haphazardly across him. She tapped her finger against her cheek in a pulse rhythm, nuzzling into him a little. Her voice was thick with sleep, and quiet.

"See? I can hear it now."

He fought the urge to smile at her, and shook his head, still not properly looking at her, his voice still a well-practised cold.

"That wasn't what I meant."

There was a brief silence, and she did not move from where she lay, but her tapping stopped, and she rested her palm against his chest for a moment, before she began to trace small circles on his skin with a fingertip.

"I know what you meant. And that's silly, too."

"Is it?"

She tugged on the locket he wore around his neck, the one with the picture of Mokuba in it, the one that he never took off and never would replace, as if to remind him of its presence. It was the thing, at times the only thing, that proved her point, and it was just as important to her that he wore it, as it was that he had never replaced it with a picture of her. Although a part of herself wondered if he ever would, she tried to ignore it, remembering instead that it was always a wonderful thing to know that there was someone else there for Seto besides herself. She knew it was not her place to interfere with the bond that had grown between the two through years of what she was sure was pain.

"I know it is. Mokuba knows it is. Anyone who would see you here would know that it is."

His hand moved to cover her own, still holding the locket.

"See? You're just being silly."

"No one has ever called me silly, before."

She looked up at him, and there was something a little too blank about the stare that he was giving the wall that made her feel, all of a sudden, a bit uncomfortable. She moved up his body, to press the warmth of her face against the side of his own.

"Well, I think it is about time that you heard it."

To her relief the look faded, and he sighed, but not entirely unhappily.

* * *

She came to visit him once, as a surprise that Mokuba had organised, on his birthday. It had felt very strange, and not at all comfortable, to have her pressed as such a stark juxtaposition to the life he had here. Mokuba had brought her up to his office- because of course, he was not intending to miss work simply because of the trivial affair of getting one year older- and she had looked so out of place against the sharp lines of business suits, in her faded denim and bright colours and warm smiles. He had let the two of them drag him out for lunch, and although neither of them had bought him presents (he had made it emphatically clear that he did not wish to receive anything) when he and Mokuba got home that night she had made a cake, and a mess in the kitchen, but he supposed that the cake was the more important thing.

To his surprise, it actually tasted quite good. Niamh must have been giving her lessons.

After Mokuba had retired for the night, Abella wandered around the lower floor whilst he sat in the living room, reading over the proofs for the executive meeting he had sat in the day before. The house was large, but not at all as she had expected. The sort of decoration that should have fitted such a house had been stripped- you could still see, on some of the walls, the faint lines from where large pictures had been taken down, and although the furniture was well made, it was more modern than the house should have held. It was as if someone had tried to make this house into something other than it was, and it left a visitor with a strange feeling of displacement.

"Does Mokuba have a girlfriend?"

Seto nodded, but there was a tightness to his jaw that made her smile.

"What's she like?"

"She is quite attractive, relatively bright, but is the sort of person with boundless optimism."

She stood behind his chair and ran her hands along his shoulders, wondering if it was even possible to carry that much weight around with you and not have it do some permanent damage with how you view the world.

"I have never liked cheerleaders."

Abella threw back her head and laughed, and felt Seto lean back, just a little, into her hands. She rested her chin on the top of his head and stayed like that, for a little while, as she looked across at a picture resting on the coffee table. She never would have imagined that Mokuba had looked like that when he was a boy- now his body was tall, one of hard planes. His physique was very similar to his brother's, although his eyes were still tinged with the same softness. His hair was the same length, but now pulled back from his face in a neat pony-tail, so that it didn't fly around his face when he was working.

Seto's stare in the picture was warm, but he was looking at his brother, not at the camera.

"Does Mokuba always work the same hours as you?"

He shook his head and she moved away, to pick up the picture so she could examine it closely.

"Being a CEO- and we run the company jointly, now he is old enough- means that much of your time is jeopardised by work, but no, I try to make sure his hours are less that mine."

"Why?"

He looked up, in surprise.

"Because I want him to be able to lead a life outside of work, and I can handle the excess anyway."

She looked over and him with a wry expression on his face.

"Obviously."

He had continued working, and when she said goodbye to him the next day she pressed herself so close to him in an embrace that it felt as if she was trying to press their skins into each other, trying to melt together to create an inseparable closeness. She stayed like that for a moment longer than would have been normal, before walking down the steps to the car that he had called for her.

She turned to him before she got in, a strange frown on her face.

"You're on a quest for self-destruction, do you know that?"

He watched the car door shut and turned away before he saw her leave. He said nothing in response, because, to that, he had no answer.

* * *

It was always he that worked through the night- no matter how long it had been, no matter how smoothly work was going, he could not break the habit, but there were the odd occasions when he did not. Once he woke at his normal time with a start, because of the coldness of the bed. The covers had slipped to the floor, and the furnace of her body was no longer pressed against him. It took him a moment to notice that she was sat underneath a skylight, leaning back on her hands with her back to him, with her knees raised and legs crossed at the ankle so that her body lay in one smooth, undulating line. She was still entirely naked, and her hair was pulled across one shoulder so the line of her back was visible.

He sat up in bed, pulling the covers back up.

"What are you doing?"

She did not turn to look at him, just kept staring up out of the window as if there were something quite miraculous out there, that she could not tear her eyes away from.

"It's a full moon tonight."

He stared incredulously at her back.

"So?"

"I like the moon. It looks so close sometimes, but it really isn't."

The silvery light was caressing her skin like a film of water, turning the milky brown to glowing, pale silk. She seemed softer in this light, smoothed out, as if the touch of the moonlight was edging her skin with the brilliance of magic. She turned to him then, smiling; she tilted her head to each side as she spoke, almost as if she were mocking herself."

"Waxing, waning; waxing, waning."

He said nothing, and after a moment she got to her feet.

"I guess I've always liked things that were out of my reach."

She looked a little sad then, as she walked towards him, so he did the only thing he knew how to do; the only thing he remembered doing for Mokuba when he was young and crying. He opened his arms to embrace her, despite feeling incredibly awkward as he did so, and incredibly conflicted about showing this much emotion to her. She fell into his embrace gratefully, and they never spoke of the conversation again.

There were many moments where such acts of affection left him feeling unsure of himself, where he would do something that most people would say was entirely out of his character that he would then feel embarrassed about doing. She had an addictive quality about her, though, that made it impossible, at times, to refuse such gestures, even if she had not explicitly asked. She was, he supposed, a little bit like coffee. She was incredibly warm, just what he needed and had the rather useful ability of being able to keep him up all night.

And he still hadn't worked out just quite_ how_ she got the energy.

But then there were moments where she seemed incredibly vulnerable, like his next words could save or break her. The time when she had asked him to have a bath with her, almost before she could stop herself, she turned eyes to him that were just a little scared that he would say no, that she had pushed it too far with him, that she had reached his limits. But something about that look made him stop the refusal that came, bluntly, on instinct, and instead his nodded his head, swallowing down his embarrassment.

He had sat with his back to one sloped end with her in between his legs, not looking at him but just resting against him in water that was very nearly too hot. He did not touch her, just let their skin rest together how she saw fit, and watched her scrub the soil from planting from under her nails with a stiff brush until they were pink and sore-looking, although she assured him that they only tingled pleasantly. Had he been another person he might have offered to do it for her, but she did not seem offended that he did not. He watched the play of water on her skin instead, and enjoyed the taste of the clean, steamy air.

She wrapped him up in over-sized, coarse towels afterwards, like you would a child, and dried him off. In a strange way it had been more intimate to watch her dry him than it had been to lie naked together, something which he did not quite understand. They fell into their bed in a flurry of falling towels and damp hair, pressing mouths to each other's bodies like they were creating lifelines.

He never told her that if felt like that, like she was bearing him up, but he was pretty sure that she knew, could tell by the way that his visits began to, just a little, increase, by the way that their conversations over the phone became just a little bit less awkward. Now he felt a strange surge of excitement every time he flew over to Spain, on the car journey to Ronda, as she opened the door with that warmth in her eyes and the same exclamation, every time.

"Seto! You're home!"

And when had this place become a home to him? When had it stopped becoming her bed, and had become theirs? He wasn't sure, but all he knew was that it had happened, and he had no way of denying it.

She forgave him any sin, that was the beauty of it. There was never any worry when he was there- it was not because she was a particularly good person herself but more because she saw no point in hanging on to what did not matter. He had tried to talk about the things he had done wrong in his life once, and she had shook her head at him, and told him that she couldn't imagine him doing anything unforgivable.

"I am not a particularly good person."

"What makes a bad person bad?"

He had looked at her, almost annoyed.

"I kidnapped someone's grandfather in order to make him play a duel with me."

She looked at him, a mixture of disbelief and shock on her face. After a moment it crumbled, into helpless laughter.

"That's the stupidest thing I have ever heard."

And that had been it- closure.

Niamh and the third woman had come in then, and laughed with them at the sight of Abella half-bent over the kitchen cabinets laughing so hard, and Niamh started making coffee and the moment was over, judgement passed. He had raised his eyebrows in defeat at the third woman, whose name Seto still had yet to find out, because he had only ever heard them calling her 'Chika', which he knew was not her real name because Abella had told them that it came from a character in a book that Niamh had loved, and so she had given her lover the same nickname. Her real identity they seemed to like to keep a closely guarded secret- at times he wondered if perhaps she, too, was the CEO of some fabulously wealthy company that liked to run away to hide in Spain with her lover.

But then, he supposed that was a stupid thought. And what did it matter what her real name was, anyway? He had heard, once, Niamh singing to her through the wall in a voice that was sweetly out of tune and a little hoarse, just singing nonsense words and 'Chika' in a warm, crooning way that sounded far too loving to really fit in with the image that he had of her. And even if that was not the name on her birth certificate, then it was of no concern, because didn't that name, for all its stupidity, define her happiness more?

He'd told Abella that theory, when he had had a little too much wine and they were lying in the post-coital comfort that made his head feel a little fuzzy.

She had hugged him, hard, and kissed him again.

"Now you're leaning, Seto."

Many things started to become less important to him when he was there, and many things took on different meanings. He remembered Mokuba asking him once about destiny, and he had had no answer. He said, curtly, that you forged your own future- never rely on anything but what you can create out of your own actions. She asked him the same question, too, but he felt like a different person when he was in the warmth of their house, and so had simply closed his eyes and shrugged.

"I don't think, as long as you do your best, that it really matters."

That thought had scared him, because it was nothing like him at all, but her soothing hand stroking his leg underneath the table as they ate soon chased that feeling away.

Mokuba noticed the difference too, but did not say anything for fear of provoking Seto, and undoing all the work that had gone into making him relax. He was as brutal a business man as ever, and no friendlier to people who he did not deem worth the effort, but there was something in his eyes, when he spoke of Andalusia, that seemed far warmer than they had been before.

Mokuba too, liked the place. It was pleasant, and Abella was lovely, but he loved it most for how obviously it made his brother happy.

He thought that, in the end, Seto perhaps deserved happiness more than anyone. He had spent too long forcing himself to be what he was not naturally that it had taken his toll on him. It was not irreversible, but it made him glad to know that someone else out there cared for his brother, and wanted him as well as Mokuba himself did.

* * *

She took him out to her greenhouse, and knelt in the dirt with him and showed him how to plant flower bulbs. There was something incredibly joyful, and tender, in the way that she stroked the hair back from his face when he had done, and he felt incredibly, irrationally proud when she put the plastic tag labelled 'Seto' in the dirt, like he had passed some sort of test that he had not realised that he had been taking.

When Seto left, they embraced with that same terrifying intensity that she had once held him with outside his own house, but for some reason, it just did not feel so scary anymore, to try and sink so far into another person that they were one. It left him with a glow of warmth that he tried his hardest not to let other people see, but was still there, regardless.

But, he supposed, it had to come to an end some time. He was sure that this could not last forever- really, it was an unfeasible assumption to believe that it could. She did not belong in his world and, as much as he sometimes wished otherwise, he did not belong in hers, either. At some point he would be forced to pick; this way of life had created two, separate people- the Seto that was for her, and the Mr Kaiba that there had always been, for work. He knew it was a foolish venture to let the two continue, but as Mokuba convinced him more and more that some work could be delegated to other people, that no, he did not have to shoulder everything himself, there were some moments when he was free from it, if only for a brief moment.

Now, there were times when he could sleep the whole night through, and stay for more than just a fleeting, day-long visit.

And that, as much as he would like to pretend otherwise, felt extraordinarily good.

Although he felt as if he could stay in that strange, childhood-summer place forever, the call of the office always took him home, back to work and offices and suits and hard looks; back to business and stress and late nights in front of the blue glow of the laptop.

And though once he knew that his instinctive decision would not to be to shun the work that he had fought so long to build, that defined him in so many ways, now… now he did not know what he would choose.

So in the mean time he did what he had so rarely allowed himself to do in the past, and stopped trying to fight the tide. One day he would have to make the choice, but for now all he could do was to continue with his work, and make sure, as he had always done, that it was as successful as it could be.

But even there, in the middle of his steel-and-dollar empire, just on occasion he would pause at his desk, and allow himself to dream, just briefly, of soft arms, and bright flowers, and the future that might just be in reach.


End file.
